Tag Archives: Compound Words

German Of The Day: Gesichtskondom

March 9, 2021 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Higher Education, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

That means face condom.

German

You know, face mask? I don’t make this up that German allows you to make this stuff up. It’s a popular national pastime.

Pandemic Inspires More Than 1,200 New German Words.

Like English, German also offers the possibility of combining of words, especially nouns. The resulting noun chains in English typically feature spaces or hyphens between the different elements, while German ones normally appear as one word. The German penchant for creating complex compound nouns has long been the stuff of comedy. Mark Twain devotes part of his essay on The Awful German Language to these “curiosities,” and many people are familiar with ones like “der Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän” (the Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain).

 

German Of The Day: Sexmonster

October 20, 2016 By in Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

That means sex monster.

Sexmonster

But that’s only because this year’s presidential election is a real Schlammschlacht.

German word-compounding really shines: Schlamm means “filth” (with connotations of “slime”), and Schlacht, in addition to meaning “fight,” as it’s used here, also means “slaughter” (which you may remember from Schlachthof-fünf in the Vonnegut classic).